Battle of St. Andre de l'Epine

[A Canadian Cat]

V4 of the scenario is in the drop box folder.  @choppinlt please check it over.  @Mad Mike go for your last adjustments.  Once I hear the all clear form you guys we can kick this off.

[choppinlt]

Cat, I am currently unable to access the file, but I will do so later today when I will have access to it.  I don't think this will slow things down much, especially if Mad Mike has some final tweaks. Let me know if you guys need anything else at this point.

[Mad Mike]

I've uploaded V5, with my final partition of forces and fortifications. They are not finally deployed yet, but I would do this during the game.

I have admittely no good feeling about the fortifications, if I bought too many or not enough. @choppinlt if you take a look, maybe you can give me some feedback on the amount of fortifications I currently have (some of them are not in their final position, obvioulsy, for example all the foxholes and bunkers).

[choppinlt]

@Mad Mike, I sent you a PM to help preserve OPSEC. I can say publicly that you can add more fortifications in places, but otherwise it looks like you have your forces selected properly. Like you said you can finalize your setup and add some things according to my message and we are ready to go. 

@Canadian Cat, your stuff all seems good to me. 

[A Canadian Cat]

Cool - @Made Mike - since you have a final edit to do feel free to kick this off when you are ready.  Let me know.

[Mad Mike]

Cool - @Made Mike - since you have a final edit to do feel free to kick this off when you are ready.  Let me know.

@Canadian Cat

OK, final adjustments made. I've created the first file for our game, it is in the dropbox. Hope Iron skill level is ok.

Should we two separate DAR threads over at the Battlefront forum?

[A Canadian Cat]

Yeah I can deal with Iron :-)  Yes, I think that two separate threads on the BFC forum would be great.

[A Canadian Cat]

We are under way. A couple of notes: I will be starting a AAR thread soon, I will link it here when I do. It will take a bit to create some initial graphics, opening discussion and setup the document. I have a lot of things going on but I want to do a decent job on the AAR so it will have a reasonably high priority but not top of the list, I'm afraid. I really do not want to get into a place where I have a tonne of turns to write up like a huge bow wave in front of me so for a little while here I'll be moving forward in fits and starts. Aka expect delays for a short while.

[choppinlt]

Thanks Cat for the update! I am excited to see what you guys come up with.  In the mean time, i have calculated all the battle results. So I am updating results battle results very soon as we await your battle results.

[choppinlt]

@Canadian Cat and @Mad Mike any updates on the battle? 

[A Canadian Cat]

It seems the German lines are a little further than I expected.  Progress is slow and no contact yet. I am hoping to get the AAR thread up and running some time to day or tomorrow morning.

So, not very exciting yet...

[Asid]

I look forward to the update.

Thanks for doing this.

Regards

[Mad Mike]

Yep, no direct contact yet, but some big artillery is falling 

[A Canadian Cat]

LOL - hopefully on someone's head?

Yeah never got to the write up yesterday or this morning.  Need more hours in the day.  But so far not very interesting so no one is missing anything.

[choppinlt]

A potential downside to playing out battles is that it can take a fair amount of time to resolve.  In this case we have a large battle being resolved PBEM, and since @Mad Mike and @Canadian Cat are on 2 different continents this is not a swift way to resolve a battle. OTOH, the cool thing is that they have the ability to resolve the battle using Combat Mission while in 2 different continents!  So I have been taking full advantage of this "pause" and accomplishing other tasks, but I think we may want to break in here to keep the scenario moving foward. We can "normalize" these battle results once they are done and make adjustments as necessary. Not coincidentally, i would like to implement a similar feature for players to use in TO. So I am going to get the next turn going while we wait for this battle to play out. Regardless of the actual battle results, going through this process has been greatly beneficial. This is the first time that I have actually converted a TO battle to CM, and this will provide lots of useful information going forward. In the mean time, we will wait for any juicy details from @Mad Mike and @Canadian Cat!